Kenowa Hills — Kenowa Hills STEM Academy freshmen got their heads in the game for the most recent end-of-unit project showcase.
The objective: build a dexterity-based board game that works, is fun to play and demonstrates the physics of momentum and collision.
Freshman Max Schmid and his group challenged themselves to design and build a shuffleboard table. Their first task, he said, was to figure out all the measurements for the wood and plan how they would fit together.
“We made a list of cuts needed for the pieces of wood and gave them to Mr. (Steven) Feutz,” he said. “The most challenging part was making sure all the pieces lined up perfectly.”
Feutz said he taught his students that it is a “real-world skill” to get the measurements right, because it’s easier to measure twice and cut once.
Max and his team knew they also needed something to help “shuffle” the pucks across the table.
“It needed something to help make the surface slippery, so we found tiny silica gel beads to buy online,” Max said.
Another group of students teamed up with not one, but two shop vacuums to take their air hockey table to the next level.
Over the noise of the vacuums blowing air into the large wooden box, the 3D-printed pucks could be heard colliding with 3D-printed handles, a sound reminiscent of arcade air hockey when scoring the puck into the opponents’ goal.
“We started by making a tiny box to see if our idea would work. And it did, so we made the bigger one,” freshman Kourtney Jennings said. “Our biggest challenge was drilling all the holes. That took a long time.”
Feutz said they successfully built the first working air hockey table — with air actually coming up through the small holes in the game board’s surface — in the history of the STEM game board showcase.
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